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'Cancer Doesn't Have Me': Teen Raised $5 Million for Charity Before His Death

The first time Stephen Sutton walked out of a hospital after being diagnosed with cancer, his surgeon told him to go home and get some rest, so Sutton went back to his house, grabbed a curly wig, found a wheelchair, and rolled around a costume party dressed as a granny.

"Because of how much weight I'd lost and because of how thin and pale I was, I was pretty convincing," Sutton said in a video describing his life since his official diagnosis in 2011. "By the end of the night, I'd been pushed around in front of a conga line in my wheelchair, having an absolutely fantastic time. This was me ... making a statement of how I was going to overcome my illness."

Bowel cancer took Sutton's life early on Wednesday after a three-year struggle with the disease, but not before the 19-year-old became a celebrity in the United Kingdom, inspired millions with his story and raised over $5 million on his JustGiving page to help fund Teenage Cancer Trust, a U.K. charity dedicated to improving the lives of young people living with cancer.

Sutton, who is from Burntwood in Staffordshire, was 15 when he first realized something was seriously wrong with his body. He had to stop playing soccer and running on a local cross-country team because his stomach cramps and other ailments became almost unbearable. He had no appetite and was quickly losing weight.

But doctors at the time told him simply to take laxatives despite Sutton and his family telling them he may have had Lynch Syndrome, a condition that increases the risk for bowel cancer and ran in his family.

Not long afterward, he was given an emergency CT scan and surgeons discovered tumors originating in his bowels had spread to his pelvis and lymph nodes. His cancer was incurable.

And yet that is where the story begins.

Sutton became something of a local celebrity, missing school only on days he had to undergo chemotherapy.

"Stephen is perhaps the most amazing person I've ever met, let alone student," said the head teacher at Chase Terrace Technology College, Stuart Jones. "It's made lots of young people [at the school] think quite differently about the sorts of decisions they're making and how they can make the best of their opportunities."

Sutton carried on for about a year before he set up a Facebook page that marked the next phase of "Stephen's Story," as the page is titled. By that point, Sutton had decided to measure life by what he had accomplished. He knew his time was limited, but the limit was undefined, so Sutton laid out 46 bucket list goals on his Faceboook page that he wanted to accomplish before cancer took him.

He wanted to skydive, play the drums in front of a massive crowd, hug an animal bigger than him, and raise $16,000 for charity. So he dove out of a plane, played drums at Wembley Stadium in London, wrapped his arms around the trunk of an elephant and blew the roof off his charity goal.

He had already raised some money for Teenage Cancer Trust, but a selfie he posted on Facebook on April 22 propelled the campaign in a way he couldn't have predicted.

Sutton thought this post, put up on April 22, might be his last. As it turned out, it was the beginning of his most successful fundraising effort.

Image: Stephen's Story, Facebook

The photo was accompanied by a farewell message.

"It's a final thumbs up from me! I've done well to blag things as well as I have up till now, but unfortunately I think this is just one hurdle too far," he wrote, using the British slang to describe how he put one over on cancer for a time.

But that, too, turned out to be another beginning.

Sutton made a brief recovery and celebrities and politicians from U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron to Ricky Gervais went public with their support for Sutton. Comedian Jason Manford even started an online campaign called #thumbsupforStephen, asking people to take selfies promoting his message, which led to donations.

Now over 200,000 individual donors have raised over $5 million, according to The Guardian, which will be by far the largest single donation in Teenage Cancer Trust's history.

Stephen's final act lasted 23 days, but it only took three for the teenager's message to travel around the globe.

"I've always been a firm believer that people are 'good,' and to see people come together for the cause recently in the way they have is incredibly touching and heartwarming," Sutton wrote on his Facebook page on April 25. "Thank you from me, and also thank you from every young cancer patient in the future who will benefit invaluably from the money raised!"

Plenty of people have expressed their sadness at Sutton's death, and while the moment is a somber one, Sutton never seemed to despair in his three-year fight with cancer.

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